Golden-Dolan 1 Joseph S.

Golden-Dolan Brandon Alva English 2010 December 8, 2013

End of Term Reflection on Genre Up until the beginning of this semester, I hadnt given the word genre a lot of thought. It did already exist in my lexicon, another vocabulary word that could be substituted for the word type or category. However, over the past three months, through much introspection, class discussion, and all out practice, I have come to look at that simple five letter word in a whole new light. I still use genre to describe a grouping of similar styles, but now I understand it is the common elements of these groups that are what define their genre. It all started with a closer inspection of the genre, movie reviews. Though I had read more than my fair share of this type of writing, I had given it little thought. It wasnt until I was shown a written guideline that broke down the movie review into its respective parts that I began to see how in spite of how free form writing is on the surface, there is still a formula at play behind the scenes. As we studied examples of these works, it became clearer that no matter whether the review was good or bad, they still exhibited these guidelines in one form or another. Of course the better reviews adhered to the rubric a tad more closely. When we moved onto the next scheduled genre, profile, I wasnt yet sure what to expect. It turned out that profiles, which focus on people from various backgrounds, were a little less defined in terms of shared components. However, they still held certain things in common that distinguished them from similar genres, such as biographies. It was these subtle distinctions that

Golden-Dolan 2 separated the genres, as if we were paring down the whole, until we finally sliced away all the minutia and arrived at the needed information that could satisfy the situation. The argument paper seemed a whole different ball game, in terms of genre. In many respects it certainly was. Wherein the genre was far removed from the other styles we had previously investigated. Yet, it also had specific functions which served to strengthen it. It was these operations which separated the good from the bad, the strong from the weak. And, as I discovered from reviewing other examples from this category, if I were able to somehow include all of these elements (sound argument, logos, ethos and pathos, counter argument and concession) then my own chosen claim could have validity no matter who the reader might be. I took much away from this section, as I have never felt myself to be strong in the argument department. The open genre topic seemed daunting at first. To choose an established genre and come up with our own set of rules which govern it, seemed above me, as if I were going to be guilty of hubris in some way. Little did I initially realize, but I already possessed the tools to accomplish this task. My group and I chose encyclopedia entries as our subject, largely because it seemed the simplest of the myriad of possible genres. How wrong we were. As we visited various samples of this writing style it became clear that there was much more to this deceptively simple category. But no matter how challenging the task turned out to be, through our studies, we became familiar with the qualifications of this genre and eventually created a sufficient set of parameters to craft our own encyclopedia entries. Now, as this semester draws to a close, one might ask if I will look at the concept of genre differently from here on. The answer is yes. I now realize that I can better understand what

Golden-Dolan 3 defines any genre by investigating samples of the style, in order to collect the common elements which make it what it is. And by doing this, I may be able to replicate this type of work in an acceptable manner.